Human habitation in space is not 'nothing'. There is still plenty we do not know about how people survive in space. A space station is a fine idea, with many many uses - it isn't the fault of the ISS that nobody has been willing to put it to good use.
CLAIMS being the operative word. Assuming you mean 20 billion (if it were 20 million, people would already be there) then I think its a fairly tall claim without the evidence to back it up. Basically, all Zubrins ideas are paper projects dreamed up by a single engineer. Not particularly credible next to NASAs efforts.
Of course it is; the police are paid for by the public purse so it would amount to having a massive government subsidy. What greedy industry wouldn't like that?
Yeah, because those virus-ridden.avi files really fuck up my computer, as do those adverts on the site the firefox cannot block, and which install rootkits on my Ubuntu install.
Before mass produced recording media, movies made enough money on cinema tickets to be profitable. Even now, there are plenty of films that make enough at the cinema to recoup their production costs and make a profit. Piracy is only a threat to shitty, overproduced films - so thank god for piracy.
I don't care if the people who work on these films are 'nice'. They are not owed a living, so they need to back the fuck off from my rights to free speech, free association, and privacy.
Too true. I am a big SC player and have been looking forward to SC2. I mainly play on LAN (with everyone having a legal copy AFAIK) but they don't seem to like that. Battle net is slow, buggy, and requires opening ports on your router. I don't want to use it every time I play.
The cracking community, however, will have no problem providing this service. What the hell does Blizzard expect us to do?
I don't think a bitchy dig at WoW players is 'Interesting' - I am a productive member of society (almost certainly far moreso than you) but I still require leisure time. In fact, I require it more.
If you play 2 hours a night, and spend an hour flying - rather than spending an hour playing and teleporting everywhere, Blizzard get the *exact same amount of money from you* so your point is therefore absurd.
Thankyou for stating what I was thinking. WoW is not an expensive past time. The amount of money I spend on my WoW subscription in one month, I can burn through in the pub in about 2 hours. Furthermore, it is unmetered, so Blizzard have no financial incentive to keep you traveling. It could be to reduce load on their servers I suppose, But I doubt it. When you fly you go through a number of areas in quick succession, rather than simply switching from one to another as you do using one of the various instant teleportation methods.
I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.
Oh, and it also gives me a chance to get myself a cup of coffee and go to the toilet:)
so you think every life has equal value, it's acceptable to mourn over a death in your family but not over someone elses death because they don't have the same lastname as you and you're therefore not treating corpses equally. how is that anything other than a totally arbitrary line?
if you just said any mourning at all is an affront to everyone else who ever died, it would at least be consistent, but what you're saying is that there actually is more and less valuable life to a subject, family is more important. now i could list a hundred cases where family certainly is less important than other people who have actually contributed to your life in an important way, have changed you or whatever and your line would seem even more arbitrary. there's also another point to make: if you mourn for your family you will diminish the value of every life in your family before you were born (unless you have mourned every one of your ancestors), what makes your current family's life more important than your ancestors?
I exclude personal mourning purely out of sympathy. It isn't any more logical than mourning someone you've never met, but I know I will never be able to make this point to someone who is experiencing such mourning. Maybe that doesn't make my point 100% consistent, but it certainly doesn't invalidate it, and I am not a monster.
yes the attention to his death is way too much and he was a crazy twat, but your argument stinks and is an arbitrary line just like celebrity praise is. no matter whether you're an atheist (which i am too btw, to get that out of the way), theist, agnostic or whatever else you might be, life of different persons has different value to each and everyone of us, human life is not equal from a subjects point of view and there is nothing wrong with that.
My argument does not 'stink'. The line between a persons emotional reaction to someone they personally know dying and the collective emotional reaction that follows the death of a celebrity is clearly not arbitary.
Have you looked into the matter of WHY ? Without giving away too much, when you research the matter, you'll run into interesting terms like obstructionism, turf protection, pork politics, ITAR, entrenched interests and common misconceptions, perpetuated by certain groups and so on.
All of which came after the beginning of the rocket age. Private enterprise was still twiddling its thumbs when Sputnik went up, despite plenty of opportunity.
Nevertheless, there are several companies currently on track to start operating manned spaceflight vehicles, and when commercially successful with orbital versions thereof later. SpaceX is shooting for manned orbital from the get-go, with or without government subsidies.
SpaceX is lagging behind state-sponsored spaceflight, and is apparently having trouble with its new launcher. Bear in mind the Falcon 1 - their only flight tested rocket - has a 75% failure rate to date. They have also delayed both Falcon 9 Flight 1 and Falcon 1 Flight 5, and they have removed pricing information from their website. Sounds like spaceflight isn't quite as easy as Elon Musk wishes it were.
Huh ?? Do you have any idea about the volume of the global commercial launch market, every year ? It isnt a "programme", as you put it. It a transportation market like any other. Currently with military lineage going back to ICBMs, but commercial market nevertheless.
What do you mean by "really struggles" ?
All current commercial launchers have been developed by states, or with substantial state funding and management.
Private enterprise has yet to produce a reliable launcher without having its hand held by governments. Market forces cannot manage credit risks, let alone the complexities of rocket science.
Possibly. It is likely that the expansion of women's rights into places with high fertility rates will stop population growth, but it is equally likely that the lack of population growth in indigenous western populations is more to do with our suicidal work ethics, which could easily be a historical anomaly.
The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site. News sites reporting the death of this one man, this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish, have been swamped with traffic whilst sites reporting the deaths of thousands of innocent people never have any problem coping with traffic: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.
I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.
We can actually do it fairly inexpensively by using Burt Rutan's White Knight Two vehicle or an improved version thereof.
WHAT!?
Pegasus is one of the most expensive launch vehicles per kg going. Even putting this aside, a rocket launched from White Knight Two (and I have seen proposals for just such a thing) would have a very small payload. It is only seriously being proposed as a quick and easy way to get Britain back into the launcher industry, launching small satellites. Using it for assembling manned spacecraft in space is laughable.
We can live sustainably here; we choose not to. On Mars, that choice does not exist. Mars colonization is the Hernan Cortes route to developing widespread sustainable living.
By necessity; free enterprise has never produced a viable manned orbital space programme, and really struggles with unmanned ones. The 'market' is a personification of human behaviour in the same way Zeus was a personification of lightning, and is about as useful. Its intellectually lazy to summon up some mysterious being or force to explain something you can't understand, and the practical results are normally very poor.
Nobody seriously thinks population growth can be relieved by missions to other planets. There are plenty of other reasons for humans to expand into the solar system:
1. Allowing the human population to continue growing when it no longer is able to on Earth. At some point there is going to have to be a global equivalent to the One Child policy in China.
2. Creating parallel cultures. Culture on Earth has become stagnant because of the force of mass media repeating the prejudices of the populace back at them. Putting 15 light minutes between yourself and the chattering classes could make a big difference.
3. Backup populations, in case of a catastrophe that seriously threatened life on Earth.
The site is still up, and will be even if the appeal is lost because it isn't exclusively a Swedish operation. The fact that the trial is utterly corrupt is balanced by the fact that its ruling is also toothless. By refusing to examine their own corruption they are only compounding their irrelevance.
To be honest, the pirate bay might not last. But something like it will. The battle is already won, but the other side simply haven't realized it yet.
The French resistance got away with it, and the Gestapo were hardly shy about crushing dissent. A whole bunch of people, in an urban environment, only connecting for a few minutes at a time, will be hard for the authorities to crack down on. They will run out of manpower and equipment before the Iranian people run out of the desire to tweet.
Based on what? Yes, Iran has infrastructure problems. No, it isn't a country of mud huts. Are you simply assuming it is because it is a muslim country?
Iranians want democracy. They are willing to fight and shed blood for democracy. Our youths sat by playing fucking XBox whilst our leaders kicked off a bloody and vicious resource war. We complain but do nothing about the constant abuses of our governments, despite the fact we are blessed with free elections, and the worse that happens to most protesters is they have photos taken of them.
Iranians can be imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for standing up to their leaders, and yet they line the streets of the capital without hesitation to demand fair government. We are in no position to lecture them about freedom and democracy - they are giving us a lesson on the concept right now. Arseholes like you who undoubtedly have never done anything political don't get to look down on these people; especially when their home grown secular democracy was originally snatched away from them by the west in order to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
Human habitation in space is not 'nothing'. There is still plenty we do not know about how people survive in space. A space station is a fine idea, with many many uses - it isn't the fault of the ISS that nobody has been willing to put it to good use.
Damn, I thought Montezuma of the Aztecs would trade us Advanced Rocketry if we converted to his religion!
CLAIMS being the operative word. Assuming you mean 20 billion (if it were 20 million, people would already be there) then I think its a fairly tall claim without the evidence to back it up. Basically, all Zubrins ideas are paper projects dreamed up by a single engineer. Not particularly credible next to NASAs efforts.
Of course it is; the police are paid for by the public purse so it would amount to having a massive government subsidy. What greedy industry wouldn't like that?
Not available in the UK due to copyright restrictions? I fucking paid for it to be made!
Yeah, because those virus-ridden .avi files really fuck up my computer, as do those adverts on the site the firefox cannot block, and which install rootkits on my Ubuntu install.
Retard.
Before mass produced recording media, movies made enough money on cinema tickets to be profitable. Even now, there are plenty of films that make enough at the cinema to recoup their production costs and make a profit. Piracy is only a threat to shitty, overproduced films - so thank god for piracy.
I don't care if the people who work on these films are 'nice'. They are not owed a living, so they need to back the fuck off from my rights to free speech, free association, and privacy.
I have been planning on buying SC 2 legitimately. This announcement has put me off somewhat.
Too true. I am a big SC player and have been looking forward to SC2. I mainly play on LAN (with everyone having a legal copy AFAIK) but they don't seem to like that. Battle net is slow, buggy, and requires opening ports on your router. I don't want to use it every time I play.
The cracking community, however, will have no problem providing this service. What the hell does Blizzard expect us to do?
Intentional pun?
I don't think a bitchy dig at WoW players is 'Interesting' - I am a productive member of society (almost certainly far moreso than you) but I still require leisure time. In fact, I require it more.
If you play 2 hours a night, and spend an hour flying - rather than spending an hour playing and teleporting everywhere, Blizzard get the *exact same amount of money from you* so your point is therefore absurd.
Thankyou for stating what I was thinking. WoW is not an expensive past time. The amount of money I spend on my WoW subscription in one month, I can burn through in the pub in about 2 hours. Furthermore, it is unmetered, so Blizzard have no financial incentive to keep you traveling. It could be to reduce load on their servers I suppose, But I doubt it. When you fly you go through a number of areas in quick succession, rather than simply switching from one to another as you do using one of the various instant teleportation methods.
I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.
Oh, and it also gives me a chance to get myself a cup of coffee and go to the toilet :)
I exclude personal mourning purely out of sympathy. It isn't any more logical than mourning someone you've never met, but I know I will never be able to make this point to someone who is experiencing such mourning. Maybe that doesn't make my point 100% consistent, but it certainly doesn't invalidate it, and I am not a monster.
My argument does not 'stink'. The line between a persons emotional reaction to someone they personally know dying and the collective emotional reaction that follows the death of a celebrity is clearly not arbitary.
All of which came after the beginning of the rocket age. Private enterprise was still twiddling its thumbs when Sputnik went up, despite plenty of opportunity.
SpaceX is lagging behind state-sponsored spaceflight, and is apparently having trouble with its new launcher. Bear in mind the Falcon 1 - their only flight tested rocket - has a 75% failure rate to date. They have also delayed both Falcon 9 Flight 1 and Falcon 1 Flight 5, and they have removed pricing information from their website. Sounds like spaceflight isn't quite as easy as Elon Musk wishes it were.
All current commercial launchers have been developed by states, or with substantial state funding and management. Private enterprise has yet to produce a reliable launcher without having its hand held by governments. Market forces cannot manage credit risks, let alone the complexities of rocket science.
Possibly. It is likely that the expansion of women's rights into places with high fertility rates will stop population growth, but it is equally likely that the lack of population growth in indigenous western populations is more to do with our suicidal work ethics, which could easily be a historical anomaly.
The twitterverse has spontaneously shifted from being a (supposed) forum for Iranian democracy to a Michael Jackson tribute site. News sites reporting the death of this one man, this self-obsessed child molester with a surgery fetish, have been swamped with traffic whilst sites reporting the deaths of thousands of innocent people never have any problem coping with traffic: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
I am an atheist, believing in no life after this one, and the upshot of this is I find all human life to have indefinite value - indefinite but basically equal. If you are mourning right now and your surname isn't "Jackson", then it is a direct affront to those who die through no fault of their own and are implicitly disregarded by the rest of the world during the absurd rituals we employ to mark the death of somebody famous.
I don't believe in human nature or historical inevitability. I believe in free will, and thus I believe people have a choice. Masses of people have made the wrong choice, and it makes me both sad and angry. The reaction to Michael Jackson's death, rather than the death itself, has put a real downer on my day.
WHAT!?
Pegasus is one of the most expensive launch vehicles per kg going. Even putting this aside, a rocket launched from White Knight Two (and I have seen proposals for just such a thing) would have a very small payload. It is only seriously being proposed as a quick and easy way to get Britain back into the launcher industry, launching small satellites. Using it for assembling manned spacecraft in space is laughable.
We can live sustainably here; we choose not to. On Mars, that choice does not exist. Mars colonization is the Hernan Cortes route to developing widespread sustainable living.
By necessity; free enterprise has never produced a viable manned orbital space programme, and really struggles with unmanned ones. The 'market' is a personification of human behaviour in the same way Zeus was a personification of lightning, and is about as useful. Its intellectually lazy to summon up some mysterious being or force to explain something you can't understand, and the practical results are normally very poor.
Nobody seriously thinks population growth can be relieved by missions to other planets. There are plenty of other reasons for humans to expand into the solar system:
1. Allowing the human population to continue growing when it no longer is able to on Earth. At some point there is going to have to be a global equivalent to the One Child policy in China.
2. Creating parallel cultures. Culture on Earth has become stagnant because of the force of mass media repeating the prejudices of the populace back at them. Putting 15 light minutes between yourself and the chattering classes could make a big difference.
3. Backup populations, in case of a catastrophe that seriously threatened life on Earth.
http://thepiratebay.org/
The site is still up, and will be even if the appeal is lost because it isn't exclusively a Swedish operation. The fact that the trial is utterly corrupt is balanced by the fact that its ruling is also toothless. By refusing to examine their own corruption they are only compounding their irrelevance.
To be honest, the pirate bay might not last. But something like it will. The battle is already won, but the other side simply haven't realized it yet.
The French resistance got away with it, and the Gestapo were hardly shy about crushing dissent. A whole bunch of people, in an urban environment, only connecting for a few minutes at a time, will be hard for the authorities to crack down on. They will run out of manpower and equipment before the Iranian people run out of the desire to tweet.
Based on what? Yes, Iran has infrastructure problems. No, it isn't a country of mud huts. Are you simply assuming it is because it is a muslim country?
And a big 'fuck you' to you.
Iranians want democracy. They are willing to fight and shed blood for democracy. Our youths sat by playing fucking XBox whilst our leaders kicked off a bloody and vicious resource war. We complain but do nothing about the constant abuses of our governments, despite the fact we are blessed with free elections, and the worse that happens to most protesters is they have photos taken of them.
Iranians can be imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for standing up to their leaders, and yet they line the streets of the capital without hesitation to demand fair government. We are in no position to lecture them about freedom and democracy - they are giving us a lesson on the concept right now. Arseholes like you who undoubtedly have never done anything political don't get to look down on these people; especially when their home grown secular democracy was originally snatched away from them by the west in order to make money.